AA Bronson at Salzburger Kunstverein / Salzburg, Austria

AA Bronson

19 September – 22 November 2015

Künstlerhaus
Hellbrunner Straße 3
5020 Salzburg



Installation view “AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights”, Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Installation view  “AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights”, Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin 


Installation view  “AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights”, Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Installation view “AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights”, Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Installation view  “AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights”, Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Installation view “AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights”, Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Installation view “AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights”,, Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Installation view “AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights”, Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Installation view “AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights”, Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Installation view “AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights”, Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Installation view “AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights”, Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Installation view “AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights”, Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Installation view “AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights”, Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Installation view “AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights”, Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Installation view “AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights”, Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Installation view “AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights”, Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Installation view "AA Bronson & Keith Boadwee. PLAID",  Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artists and Esther Schipper, Berlin


Installation view "AA Bronson & Keith Boadwee. PLAID",  Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artists and Esther Schipper, Berlin


Installation view "AA Bronson & Keith Boadwee. PLAID", Salzburger Kunstverein 2015, photo © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artists and Esther Schipper, Berlin



The Salzburger Kunstverein and Grazer Kunstverein are delighted to announce their collaboration with AA Bronson (1946, Vancouver, Canada) on two concurrent exhibitions. Bronson is artist and curator, subject and object, in this hybrid project. Both exhibitions feature his artwork, collaborations with younger artists, performances, and artworks by friends. A pioneer of collaborative and queer visual art practice, he is a founding (and the only surviving) member of General Idea (1969-94).


AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights
featuring AA Bronson with Chrysanne Stathacos, Mark Jan Krayenhoff van de Leur, Keith Boadwee, Adrian Hermanides, Matthias Herrmann, Gareth Long, Ebe Oke, JX Williams.

AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights transforms the Main Hall of the Salzburger Kunstverein into an activated, queer tableaux of moving and still parts, presenting an arena of engagement, transgression and reflection. The exhibition is, in one regard, a queer adaptation of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych of the same name (circa 1500), here aesthetically married with Japan’s famous Zen garden of Ryoan-ji (1499). Both the painted garden and the rock garden offer us a vision of the spiritual as a constructed universe. AA Bronson asks us to reconsider them in this exhibition, each alike a universe held within dramatized limits, like a gay bar or a drag club. 



AA Bronson & Keith Boadwee. PLAID
The second component of the exhibition takes place in the Kabinett: AA Bronson and Keith Boadwee have collaborated on an homage to the anus. They present a painting series titled PLAID, performative works created by squirting paint from their sphincters. The paintings are simultaneously a nod to and simulacrum of classic modernist serial painting and Actionism both; they posit the body, and especially—in Freudian terms—the anus, as the fount of creation. AA Bronson says: “The asshole IS the revolution.”